Category: linux

I recently installed Ubuntu 9.10 x64 on one of my workstations here at home. It has a fairly simple task, but the machine needs to be available over VNC.

Previously, I had used an older, headless box with Xubuntu to do the job and used a VNC server to set up a session I could connect to which ran the needed task. This time I tried to use the built-in Remote Desktop feature.

Unfortunately, I discovered a problem with this approach. The VNC client would connect ok and appear to take input from the remote client, but the screen would never update or refresh on the client correctly.

This appears to be a bug with the nvidia restricted drivers (which I am using) and the fancy graphic transitions. It apparently doesn’t “damage” the underlying X server, causing the VNC to never issue a screen refresh to the client. While this article describes it for 9.04, it applies for 9.10 as well. I simply turned off the visual effects as described in the article and my remote desktop started working correctly again! Yay!

The reason I wrote this article and posted it is because it took a while before I was able to find a solution for it. Google ultimatey found the answer after enough iterations of searching, but not everyone has that kind of patience. Hopefully, someone out there will find this article useful.

Since Ubuntu was giving me the finger on this old iBook, I decided to try a different distribution. I’ve heard about and been meaning to try OpenSUSE for a while now. Given it supports my vintage PowerPC, I figured it was worth a try.

The first issue I encountered with OpenSUSE 11.1 was that I needed a DVD to do the installation! Since my iBook only has a CD drive, I thought I might be out. However, they have a “mini CD” that downloads everything off the Internet.

The instructions for network installation weren’t very specific, but I was able to figure out what choices to make. The installation process, after the initial load of the installer, was graphical and fairly straightforward. A high-speed Internet connection is definitely recommended since pretty much everything is downloaded–2.5 gigabytes of data!

Or so I thought. I should tell you something at this point that I did something that complicated matters a bit.

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A couple years ago, I tried installing Ubuntu on an old Apple iBook G3 I have with only moderate results, as shown in this YouTube video:

While I know that Adobe Flash and AIR won’t ever be supported on the PowerPC chips that run in a lot of the older Macs, the size of this iBook puts it real close to the “netbook” category. Since I don’t see myself spending $400-$500 on a new computer anytime soon, why not try and repurpose one I already have?

My expectations for this PowerPC G3 with 576mb of RAM and 10gb of disk aren’t high. I just want something with a reasonable keyboard that has WiFi and runs a web browser. It’s got all that and the current versions of Ubuntu (8.10 as I write this) will support the wireless (which it didn’t back in 6.06, which was when I took this video), at least in theory. Why not give it a try? Details after the jump.

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If you’re a Mac or Linux person and you want to run Windows apps without a Windows license, then the folks at Codeweavers have a deal for you. Today–and today only–until midnight GMT-5, you can get your own, fully functional copy of Codeweavers Crossover Linux or Mac for free.

Why are they doing this? It was a publicity stunt. The folks at Codeweavers challenged George Bush to do something to improve our lot in his last months of his presidency. Whether he was ultimately responsible for gas prices plummeting a buck over the past month or not is irrelevant, but the folks at Codeweavers saw that one of their goals was meant and they are keeping to their word.

The Codeweavers Crossover product is a commercial version of Wine, which is an open-source project that allows Windows executables to run on non-Windows systems. It’s not perfect, since it is a cleanroom implementation of the Windows API and they haven’t got bug-for-bug compatibility yet. However, it does run some specific applications like Microsoft Office reasonably well. It also runs Internet Explorer, which is useful in and of itself.

The main thing you get with Crossover is a much nicer installation process for Windows applications. It knows about the most common applications and is able to configure itself for an optimal installation. It makes the application installation process a bit easier.

The other amazing part about about this is that you also get a year of support with this freebie. This entitles you to technical support as well as a year of updates on the product. Quite righteous!

I’ve been waiting for this for a while now. SightSpeed is announcing today that they are making a Linux version of their video conferencing application available for Linux–specifically pre-installed on Dell’s newly-launched Inspiron Mini 9 device. Dell Video Chat for SightSpeed powered by SightSpeed, as it is called, is available pre-installed on both the Linux and Windows XP versions of these devices!

The press release goes into how well-suited SightSpeed video is for these lower-end notebooks. I can attest to just how little CPU horsepower is needed to run SightSpeed based on personal experience. While you can sometimes get great video from Skype with the High Quality video, the SightSpeed video experience is far more consistent under lesser CPU and bandwidth conditions!

Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to a downloadable version of the Linux SightSpeed so I can test it out for myself.

Image via Wikipedia

For the second day in a row, my internal email at Nokia causes me to drop what I’m doing and blog. And this, my friends, is some news. BIG news.

According to a press release, Nokia intends to acquire the remaining shares of Symbian that it does not already own. It already owns a controlling interest, so it shouldn’t be too hard to get the rest of them. Of course, there’s also the pesky EU approvals.

That in itself is big news, as it makes it far easier for Nokia to make operating system-level changes. But that’s only part of the endgame. Nokia plans to turn over control of this newly acquired intellectual property over to the Symbian Foundation, which will then license it–royalty free–to members of the Symbian Foundation. Members of this foundation include Motorola, Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson, several mobile operators–including AT&T!–and chipmakers like Broadcom, STMicroelectronics, and TI.

And the final endgame here is open-sourcing the Symbian platform entirely under the Eclipse Public License. That means not only the device manufacturers can have at it, but everyone can! This is planned to happen within the next two years, but we all know how these things go.

So what’s going to make up the Symbian Foundation in terms of a base? Symbian, S60, some parts of UIQ and MOAP(S). While things will start fragmented, the idea is to create a unified, open-source platform based on a system that a lot of people already know and love (or hate).

It’s going to be some time before we see the results of all this hard work. Clealy, though, this is a response to Android, and based on what I’ve heard about Android, it will be more open source than Android is. It’s also a relatively known platform, versus Android, which isn’t even shipping yet!

How will this factor into responding the iPhone? How does Maemo fit into this strategy? Hard to say at this point. Things just got a bit more interesting in mobile platforms, though, and it’s a great time to be a part of Nokia, even if I work for a part of the company that has nothing to do with this work

To the average person, the number of computers in my home is appalling. There are three computers downstairs alone, one for the other members of my family. Then there’s my office.

One problem with the downstairs computers is that they all, without exception, have web filtering software on them. I am not under the delusion that they are a substitute for parental oversight–there’s a reason the kids computers are in a public room–but it’s nice to have something around to catch most accidental exposures to inappropriate material. Let’s face it, when the kids are old enough, if they want to get around the filters, they’ll figure out a way.

Meanwhile, I occasionally use the kids computers. Mostly it’s because I like to go downstairs when the kids are trying to go to sleep. It’s also nice to have a change of environment. However, the web filters end up creating problems for me when I try to, say, read my RSS feeds and people link to the latest cool video on YouTube. Or I want to check what’s happening on Plurk or Twitter. Unfortunately, it means fighting with the web filter.

Now I suppose I cold buy a “better” web filter rather than rely on K9 Web Protection from Blue Coat, but I like the filter. It generally works, it’s free, does a fairly good job of catching inappropriate or questionable websites, and doesn’t try and do everything. It also helps that their CEO used to be in charge of the part of Nokia I worked for many, many moons ago, and I thought he was a nice guy.

The solution: a portable computing environment embedded in a flash drive. I could dual boot the computers, but that creates other problems. The flash drive solution is clean.

Linux is the only feasible OS one can install on a flash drive–at least easily. There are actually a number of different distributions you can install on a USB flash drive, many of which are featured–complete with step-by-step instructions on how to install it–on a site called Pen Drive Linux.

I wasted an evening on trying to get Ubuntu (along with various derivatives) installed on a flash drive, but ran into a problem where the distribution was failing to boot because it was trying to find the non-existent floppy drive on this IBM ThinkPad T43 I am using.

What ended up working the best for me, at least, was Slax. It is based on Slackware Linux, which has been around forever. It was one of the first Linux distributions I started playing with in the mid-1990s. It includes a number of modules, including a relatively recent build of Firefox 2 complete with Adobe Flash integrated. It’s not set up the most optimally out of the box–for example, the default user runs as root, which is almost as bad as the default Windows behavior–but with a little bit of hacking, it works just fine without needing to run as root.

I now have my own environment complete with some local storage on a older 1 gigabit flash drive. I can stick it into any computer that is able to boot off of USB, and it should give me access to the Internet and a few other programs. Works pretty well for me.

photo credit: boredzo